Archive for September, 2010

I forgot the goggle things, butâ€¦ yeah. Anyway, this is another Artist’s Edition sketch, for Daniel Farrelly, featuring Becky as Ramona from Scott Pilgrim. And once again, I missed a couple of lines before I took the picture. :1 Anyway. Thanks, Dan!

When I sawÂ Gone Baby Gone back in 2007,Â one late plot twist soured the film for me a bit, I assume that was taken from the book, and I came away exceedingly impressed by the cast and especially its directorâ€¦ Ben Affleck. What could have been a very ham-fisted tale was dealt with with impressive deftness â€” especially for a first-time feature director and an actor-turned-director, at that.

Actor-directors often lack an eye for visuals, opting instead to plop the camera in front of their actors and let ’em go. They tend to get very good performances, but lack enough visual polish to be more than just serviceable directors, at least for me. George Clooney is a solid director (I love Good Night and Good Luck, in particular), for instance, but visually, his films are somewhat pedestrian.

When The Town was announced, I was both excited to see if Ben Affleck’s fantastic turn behind the camera was just a fluke, and kind of apprehensive about his choice for a lead: himself.Â Turns outÂ â€” unlike many actor-directors â€” Affleck knows well enough to let his co-stars outshine him when they need to, and on the wholeÂ The Town was a hell of a lot of fun.Â While the film isn’t half as heavy and thought-provoking as Gone Baby Gone, it’s not trying to be. The Town is much more of a straight-up crime flick, but once again, it’s impressively well-told.

The plot â€” which was drawn from the Chuck Hogan novel Prince of Thieves â€” goes like this: in the course of a bank robbery, the robbers take a hostage (Rebecca Hall). Afraid that she may know something that could send them to jail, the leader of the robbers, Doug (Affleck), begins to spy on her, eventually meeting her andâ€¦ well, this being the movies, they fall in love. It’s a bit of a stretch, but it’s handled well enough that I got past it easily. Their new relationship established the real stakes of the film â€” not just their relationship (which is a bit hard to care about), but Doug’s relationship with his partners in crime.

Anchoring the film are three robberies: a bank robbery that opens the film, an armored car robbery, andâ€¦ one other one that I’ll let you discover on your own. Crucially, Affleck directs these, too, with a surprisingly strong hand.Â But the characters and their varied collisions are every bit as tense and enthralling as the action, and it’s those scenes that lift the movie up from just another gritty, violent, but ultimately empty crime flick to the kind of movie I’ll gladly revisit again.

Ben Affleck the director is officially, most definitely,Â not a one hit wonder.

The Town is rated R for violence, language, drug use, and a brief flash of boobies early in the film. Not Blake Lively’s.

Here’s an example of the sort of sketches I’m doing for the Artist’s Editions. (I do actually sign it TO you â€” or someone else, if you ask me to; I just digitally removed the person’s name for privacy reasons.)

Most actually don’t have this much black on them, because it actually starts to make the paper curl a little bit. Also, since I’m left-handed and the paper (although it’s a matte stock) has a bit of gloss to it, I have a tendency to smudge the marker, so I need to avoid very detailed sketches in the books. That’s why they’re only $5 more than the regular edition, not $10, like most Artist’s Editions of webcomics collections.

If you’d like something extra complicated, I’d really recommend getting one of the sketches from the store instead. I ink those with a brush or crow quill on Bristol, so I can get much more detailed with them.

Oh, whoops, and I just noticed I missed a line along the left side of Kurt’s face. I’ll fix that before I mail it.Â Anyway, I’m sure most of you aren’t expecting too incredibly much; I mean, it’s not like I’m known for my hand-drawing skills. :)

In this Kickstarter backer comic for Chase Davis, Jason and Becky have decided to let Franklin teach them how to play EVE Online, a science fiction MMO that I was addicted to for the better part of two months about a year ago. It’s such an amazingly deep game that it’s all but impossible to sum up in only one page, so I had to cut out massive swaths of dialog until you get what you see here. But people familiar with the game will understand what they’re talking about. And hopefully some of the rest of you will, too.

This is probably the last of the Kickstarter backer comics I’ll be sharing here. The others have requested their strip not be posted online. But there will be other hand-drawn Multiplex comics comingâ€¦ sooner or later. This is what Deleted Scenes is all about.